Varieties of Digital Authoritarianism

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Laura Howells ◽  
Laura A. Henry

Digital authoritarianism threatens the privacy and rights of Internet users worldwide, yet scholarship on this topic remains limited in analytical power and case selection. In this article, we introduce a comprehensive analytical framework to the field of Internet governance and apply it first, briefly, to the well-known case of China and then, in more depth, to the still-understudied Russian case. We identify the extent and relative centralization of Internet governance as well as proactive versus reactive approaches to governance as notable differences between the cases, highlighting variation among digital authoritarians’ governance strategies. We conclude that Russia’s Internet governance model is less comprehensive and consistent than China’s, but its components may be more easily exported to other political systems. We then consider whether recent changes to Russia’s Internet governance suggest that it could converge with the Chinese model over time.

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (5) ◽  
pp. 26-32
Author(s):  
N. S. FILATOV ◽  

The article is devoted to the study of the concept of the Internet governance model with the participation of stakeholders and its impact on business in regions and countries, as well as to the discussion of sustainable development goals related to Internet governance. Examples of how enterprises suffer from state management methods in this area are presented.


2021 ◽  
pp. 097152312199334
Author(s):  
Khandakar Farid Uddin

Governance can help minimise the effects of catastrophes. Countries had some time to prepare for the current coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, but some did not use it to improve their arrangements. This research investigates several countries’ governance strategies, develops a governance model and critically analyses Bangladesh’s failure as a case of governance catastrophe. This study applies qualitative methods of textual data analysis to explore data sourced from current newspapers, blogs, websites, journal articles and books to determine the most appropriate evidence and generate connections and interpretations. The COVID-19 pandemic has had devastating consequences for all countries; however, the different national responses have provided the opportunity to measure governments’ capability in addressing the crisis. Governments need to study the current COVID-19 response and enhance their governance capacities to minimise the spread of infection and to prepare for the challenge of socio-economic recovery.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 501-519

Under the "weak state" regime of modern China, it was difficult for the country’s modernization process to develop without the effective intervention of a centralized state. In the process of government governance, absorbing social organizations and civil forces as agents had proved to be an effective method. Beiyang government’s governance strategy of ‘using agents to regulate agents’ in the documentary railway billing business could be regarded as typical of the diversity of government management. Qing Dynasty, government departments were not directly responsible for railway freight for various reasons, instead, they allowed railway transshipment companies to act as agents for freight management. Then transshipment companies gradually became an obstacle to Beiyang government’s reform on freight transport. However, under the Republic of China, the new-style bank discovered a benign opportunity to develop documentary railway billing service and created a bottom-up institutional reform model. Through the service, the bank became the new agent for the supervision of the transshipment company, which not only regulated the operation, but also forced railroad bureaus in the Yangzi Delta to be primarily responsible for railway freight. The Central Ministry of Transportation of Beiyang Government decided to promote this agency governance model and billing service nationwide. Received 11th January 2021; Revised 2nd June 2021; Accepted 20th July 2021


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (6) ◽  
pp. 587-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuomas Ylä-Anttila ◽  
Juho Vesa ◽  
Veikko Eranti ◽  
Anna Kukkonen ◽  
Tomi Lehtimäki ◽  
...  

Building on theories of valuation and evaluation, we develop an analytical framework that outlines six elements of the process of consolidation of an idea in the public sphere. We then use the framework to analyse the process of consolidation of the idea of climate change mitigation between 1997 and 2013, focusing on the interplay between ecological and economic evaluations. Our content analysis of 1274 articles in leading newspapers in five countries around the globe shows that (1) ecological arguments increase over time, (2) economic arguments decrease over time, (3) the visibility of environmental nongovernmental organizations as carriers of ecological ideas increases over time, (4) the visibility of business actors correspondingly decreases, (5) ecological ideas are increasingly adopted by political and business elites and (6) a compromise emerges between ecological and economic evaluations, in the form of the argument that climate change mitigation boosts, rather than hinders economic growth.


Author(s):  
Mário Matos

This contribution focuses on the multifaceted conceptualization of travel in Western cultural history. Several discourses will be addressed that, over time, have oscillated between the sceptical and restrictive on the one hand, and the truly admiring perspectives of the journey on the other. A number of visions of the phenomenon of travel under the binomial spell/curse will be analysed. The different contexts and historical factors that determined the value of travel will be exposed, from its great power of attraction to its restriction by inward looking religious and political systems.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
I Enwereuzo ◽  
Pedro Antunes ◽  
David Johnstone

© 2019 Association for Information Systems. All rights reserved. Crowdsourcing can be an adopted strategy for researchers where tasks are distributed to internet users to harness different forms of data, which adds to the reliability and validity of the research process. As theory testing is an essential part of the research process, involving activities that most times needs input from different and diverse participants, the need to consider adopting the crowdsourcing strategy for theory testing is paramount. Adopting a design science paradigm to manage this challenge, we design an analytic framework which comprises of important attributes that need to be considered if crowdsourcing is to be used for any of the theory testing activities. The framework which was justified using sample cases gives us an insight into what attributes make such activity crowdsource-able. The value of this artefact lies in its capacity to help researchers utilize crowdsourcing to their advantage.


Author(s):  
David T. Buckley

How do countries reconcile religion and democracy, both at critical junctures and over time? This chapter sets out a theoretical framework linking institutions of “benevolent secularism” to maintaining what Stepan has called the twin tolerations between religion and democracy. Institutions shape preferences within religious and secular elites over the place of religion in public life, and build religious-secular and interfaith partnerships that stabilize the twin tolerations when they face new challenges over time. After setting out the theoretical framework, the chapter discusses case selection and data collection.


Author(s):  
Hocine Chebi

The number of hits to web pages continues to grow. The web has become one of the most popular platforms for disseminating and retrieving information. Consequently, many website operators are encouraged to analyze the use of their sites in order to improve their response to the expectations of internet users. However, the way a website is visited can change depending on a variety of factors. Usage models must therefore be continuously updated in order to accurately reflect visitor behavior. This remains difficult when the time dimension is neglected or simply introduced as an additional numeric attribute in the description of the data. Data mining is defined as the application of data analysis and discovery algorithms on large databases with the goal of discovering non-trivial models. Several algorithms have been proposed in order to formalize the new models discovered, to build more efficient models, to process new types of data, and to measure the differences between the data sets. However, the most traditional algorithms of data mining assume that the models are static and do not take into account the possible evolution of these models over time. These considerations have motivated significant efforts in the analysis of temporal data as well as the adaptation of static data mining methods to data that evolves over time. The review of the main aspects of data mining dealt with in this thesis constitutes the body of this chapter, followed by a state of the art of current work in this field as well as a discussion of the major issues that exist there. Interest in temporal databases has increased considerably in recent years, for example in the fields of finance, telecommunications, surveillance, etc. A growing number of prototypes and systems are being implemented to take into account the time dimension of data explicitly, for example to study the variability over time of analysis results. To model an application, it is necessary to choose a common language, precise and known by all members of a team. UML (unified modeling language, in English, or unified modeling language, in French) is an object-oriented modeling language standardized by the OMG. This chapter aims to present the modeling with the diagrams of packages and classes built using UML. This chapter presents the conceptual model of the data, and finally, the authors specify the SQL queries used for the extraction of descriptive statistical variables of the navigations from a warehouse containing the preprocessed usage data.


Author(s):  
Frank Schimmelfennig ◽  
Thomas Winzen ◽  
Tobias Lenz ◽  
Jofre Rocabert ◽  
Loriana Crasnic ◽  
...  

This chapter introduces the case studies. It describes the rationale for studying cases, our case selection, and the structure of the case study chapters. The case studies offer an opportunity to examine the conditions under which international organizations establish international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) in more detail, take into account alternative configurations of conditions for IPI establishment, and trace the processes of strategic democratic legitimation. In addition, the cases include some of the rare cases of empowerment, in which IPIs increase their authority over time. The case selection aims at a diverse set of cases representing positive and negative cases of IPI establishment, a variety of world regions and historical periods, and stark variation across the conditions of parliamentarization.


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